Belts
Okay, so now for the only major item left - the belts! I'm actually really proud of how these came out, considering I had no clear idea of how I wanted to do them going in. Let's start at the bottom layer:
View attachment 691149
1. Wide belt
I made this out of foam (2 mm). Cut 6 base panels:
- 2 trapezoidal pieces, for the front
- 2 short rectangular pieces, for the sides
- 2 long rectangular pieces, for the back
When measuring your pieces, remember that there should be some overlap between them, in order to glue them together. Also, the belt seems to sit at the waist rather than the hips. Remember to give some room for the layers of the tunic...
Then cut thin borders for these pieces, and glue them together.
For the stringy texture of the front trapezoid, I just used hot glue. Another method could be to glue twine/hemp cord.
I painted mine first (layer of gesso, then several layers of acrylic), then glued them (contact adhesive), then sealed with matte mod podge. The colour itself appears to be a dark chocolate brown.
For the closure, I used velcro. However this worked not very well at all! My velcro pulled off from the foam on the day - probably due to a mixture of hot weather (Australia!), not strong enough glue, and I maybe put on a couple of kilos XD Luckily it doesn't matter too much how you close the belt, since the back is usually hidden under your cloak - so something like a lace-up closure or even just a normal belt buckle could work.
2. Plaited belt & Belt ring
There are some crazy talented people out there who have woven their own belts ( D= ) however I have neither the talent nor the patience for that! I
ordered a couple of super cheap ones from ebay early on and they were pretty good. For the layout of these belts... It looks like there are two strips in front, and they combine at the sides (I had a limited length of belt, so this was the only option for me). The lower strip has the belt ring and sits slightly off centre.
Wearing the wide belt, I marked out where I thought the belt keepers should sit, then glued them down. Then I threaded through the top woven belt and secured the ends to the ends of the wide belt.
Then I secured the sides of the lower belt/belt ring to the sides, slightly off centre. Again, my methods weren't too pretty on the sides, but the cloak hides all!
At the last minute (3 days before the convention! *facepalm*) I decided I liked the look of the red belts of the end of the movie (vs. the traditional brown), so I ended up 'dying' them with food colouring and permanent markers (paint didn't seem to work very well, since the belts were elastic).
For the belt ring .... well, I wasn't entirely sure how to do it! (again, 3D printing makes this 10x easier!) In the end I grabbed some thick foam (I think it was a gardening pad lol) and carved a couple of wonky circles from it. The outer circle has a rounded outer edge an an inward sloping inner edge. The inner circle has an outward sloping outer edge and just a straight inner edge... if that makes any sense XD I then slathered the lot in spackle (? not sure if it was actually spackle...) to cover up the texture of the foam, sanded and painted. I'm unsure what colour the belt ring is - in some lights it looks gold/brown, in others more like a gunmetal grey. So really - whatever floats your boat. Mine is brown, with gold highlights on the edges to give it some dimension. I looks like it should have a metallic / polished finish, but in the absence of that... mod podge!
I found some wool with tiny gold sequins on it that I really liked, so I used it to stitch the ring to the belt. It looks like there are 4 'stitches' for each side. For the dangling part at the bottom, I cut my remaining belt length (not very much, by this point!) in half and layered the two on top of each other - don't forget to thread on the belt keepers! The tassel part at the end is supposed to be all one piece, however I didn't have enough belt for that, so I used the same wool as before and it turned out beautifully. To do this:
- Cut several lengths of wool and glue them horizontally, to the back of the belt
- Fold them over the sides of the belt towards the front, bunch by bunch, crossing at the front and gluing as you go
- Glue a little extra to the front to bulk up the tassel and hide the raw end of the belt underneath, if needed